The remains of river names /

This "novel in stories" opens with "My Name's Roy," where readers meet 10-year-old Dillon Graham, waking up hungry one morning only to find that his parents are gone again. Art and Janice disappear a lot. What scares Dillon is that this time they have taken all the food with them. In other stories, the rest of Dillon's hapless family introduce themselves. Art grows pot in the basements of their rented houses and loves music, as long as it's not more recent than Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Janice waits tables in a string of interchangeable diners dotting the highways of Washington State. Sibling Milton, 15, wistfully envies the settled, comfortable lives of the classmates he bullies, even as he polishes his hard-guy act. Briggs' characters are achingly fine, wringing empathy and exasperation at every blundering turn. Through the years, each new job, new house, new lover leaves them untouched, as cruel and innocent as when their journey began. --June Hathaway-Vigor

The countercultural excesses of the 1960s and 1970s cast a long shadow on the family at the heart of Briggs's keenly intuitive debut effortÄa collection of 11 linked storiesÄin which narrators alternate between four members of a doomed and unnamed family. As the book opens in the early 1980s, middle-schooler Milton and grade-schooler Dillon have just been ditched by their parents, Art and Janice, who fled their Seattle-area house when the police closed in on Art's pot-growing operation. Mom and Dad eventually return, but their misadventures repeatedly throw the family into chaos just as the two boys enter adolescence. Art serves jail time, Janice takes the kids and leaves him, then lives with a succession of boyfriends and finally kicks Milton out at age 16. Desperate for some form of stability, Milton pursues exercise and violence, growing into a powerful weight-lifter and a would-be rapist, while little brother Dillon becomes bookish and defiant. Sweetly, and unexpectedly, the adult brothers cling to each other with a bond forged from their dysfunctional childhoodÄbut one senses that nothing can really save them, not even romantic love, which Milton finds in a bar and Dillon finds in a waitress like his mother. The book's bleak outlook is reflected in its title, which stems from one of Janice's friends, Joe, who tells Dillon that nothing has value but "the old names of places... they are the only spoken thing that is not a lie." Briggs exhibits an impressive gift for conveying dark situations and murky motives with illuminating clarity. His multivalenced prose frequently spotlights his characters' befuddled, soulful searches for greater meaning, capturing the atmosphere of ambivalence, despair and stifled hope around a family painfully unraveling as two boys roughly, uncertainly, become men. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved